True Accounts of a Cruel Time: The Life of Edward Schmidt

A personal account of a young man’s struggle amidst war. The Schmidt ancestors leave German seeking a better life and arrive in Russia by the Black Sea in 1808. Their descendent, Edward Schmidt, is born in 1926 and tells of his personal experiences of oppression and cruelty that he and his family suffer in communist Russia. War is everywhere and at 16 years old, he becomes separated from his family and makes his way towards Germany.

In German occupied Poland he is the only boy who does not volunteer for the German army and he is the only one who is drafted. An unwilling soldier, he walks around Germany with the army until captured in 1945. At the age of 18, he becomes a prisoner of war until finally he is released in 1946. Unable to settle in post war Germany, Edward leaves in 1950 to find the peace and freedom in Canada that has been denied him all of his life in Europe.

Now, sixty one years after arriving in Canada, at eighty four years old, Edward describes with clarity, the early difficult years of his life.

Edward Schmidt.

The Schmidt Family living in Baden, Kutschurgan District, South Russia (today near Odessa, Ukraine)